Red Hat Makes Linux Better

Your Choice of GUIs

Unlike Windows, Linux doesn't come with a standard GUI. Instead, you select a window manager for the X graphical subsystem. There are several to choose from, each with its own weaknesses and strengths, but until recently, none has been as good as the Windows interface.

With 6.0, Red Hat defaults to the GNOME/Enlightenment GUI, which looks and feels every bit as snazzy and functional as Windows. It's much more customizable, but the version shipped with 6.0 is pretty raw--stability is below par, with applications crashing for no apparent reason. At times the GUI itself freezes, locking the keyboard.

Until the bugs are worked out, forget about GNOME/Enlightenment. Instead, use the excellent KDE GUI, also bundled with 6.0. For some reason, Red Hat has included a prerelease version of KDE 1.1.1 with 6.0, but if you upgrade to the release version, you'll have a highly functional and full-featured GUI most Windows users will feel at home with.

Great Additions--and Glaring Omissions

Red Hat Linux 6.0 comes with kernel 2.2.5-15, which supports more hardware, with more device drivers, than the 2.0.x series kernels used in version 5.0. The new kernel supports up to four x86 CPUs per system.

Version 6.0 also adds limited support for Plug and Play devices--mostly parallel port peripherals. And support for software RAID levels 0, 1, 4, and 5 is standard, although hardware RAID is recommended for mission-critical servers.

Another key improvement in version 6.0 is the enhancement of Linuxconf, the administrator tool favored by Red Hat. With Linuxconf you can manage not only system settings, but also servers such as DNS, Samba, and Apache. In addition, you can set up firewall policies and view system information. Linuxconf is a great tool that will cut down on administration time because with it, you no longer need to edit myriad text files scattered all over the system. What's more, you can access Linuxconf remotely with a Web browser and add new administrator functions.

Red Hat 6.0 also adds support for TrueType fonts, which eliminates one of the prime deficiencies of any UNIX variant: a poor selection of screen fonts. TrueType support gives you fonts as good-looking as those on any Windows system.

These improvements are great, but there's a lot missing from Red Hat Linux 6.0. First, the 2.2 kernel still doesn't support some of the hottest PC technologies such as the Universal Serial Bus and FireWire interfaces, DVD, ACPI, and the ATM networking protocol. To take advantage of these, you have to run Windows.

More serious for a server operating system are the limits on system memory and file sizes. Red Hat 6.0 can use a maximum of 960MB of RAM, and its Ext2fs file system allows a maximum file size of 2GB. In comparison, NT can use 4GB of RAM and supports file sizes up to 64GB.

Notes posted on the Web and Usenet newsgroups by Linux kernel developers indicate that many of these omissions and limitations will be rectified with the release of kernel 2.4 this fall. But it's still disappointing that multimedia technologies are so poorly supported in kernel 2.2.

Which brings us to the question of desktop use.